About the Book

Long before descending into the underworld of addiction in Permanent Midnight—the memoir, and later film, that made him famous—Jerry Stahl had built a singular career reporting from America’s psychic gutters and cultural sideshows. Ricocheting from porn sets, televangelists, undertaker conventions, recovery culture, and all manner of Hollywood grotesquerie, he fearlessly explored the darker territory of heroin, fatherhood, Jewish identity, and survival. Stahl’s work has always been electric—but much of it had lain buried in the lost world of Alt-weeklies and pre-internet magazines, decimated by the digital corporate ogre.

Now, in Gonzo Neurotic, Stahl brings together the New Journalism that shaped his singular voice, interlaced with his own commentary on his youthful lunacy and catastrophic life choices. Spanning the 1970s to the 2020s, the book takes readers from the ‘wet heart of Pageantland’ at the Miss America contest, to the twisted realms of post-nuclear cult erotica, to the TV Show ALF, and to the extremes of midnight moviedom. Simultaneously, Stahl charts his own mental and physical struggles alongside profiles of such figures as Marlon Brando, Samuel Jackson, Benicio del Toro, and an enterprising brothel owner who opted for the professional name “Hillary.” The result is a sharp, wickedly funny, and ultimately cathartic reckoning with a half-century of cultural and personal upheaval.

Praise for Jerry Stahl

“Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.”

—Anthony Bourdain

“No one can make me laugh while kicking me down the dark tunnel of self like Jerry Stahl.”

—Marc Maron

“Gonzo Neurotic is hilarious, brutal and outrageously self-revelatory. Stahl writes with a kind of wildass genius that renders the mundane deranged and the deranged relatable. He is a complete original, and one of my favorite living writers.” 

—Lydia Lunch

“An acid wit as deadly serious as it is hilarious.”

—Eric Bogosian

“Stahl is celebrated for his masochistic honesty that is never less than brutal and almost always on the other side of hope.” 

—The Brooklyn Rail

“A better-than-Burroughs virtuoso.”

—The New Yorker

“Jerry, you are an extraordinary, eccentric and screwed-up human being.” 

—Isabel Allende

“Wisecracking, poignant and frequently hilarious, the voice never cracks . . . in terms of its getting under [the subject’s] skin . . . it’s without equal.”

—The Independent

“Gonzo meets the Shoah in this wildly irreverent—and brilliant—tour . . . Vivid, potent, decidedly idiosyncratic.”

—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Mordantly funny . . . Fusing provocative insights with razor-edged wit, this offers a captivating take on a haunting chapter of history. 

—Publishers Weekly

“A Kafkaesque masterpiece . . . flavorful rum punch in the face.” 

—Bookreporter

About the Author